The Rose Sufi Crescent appear to be Muslims whose faith can genuinely be called the Religion of Peace, following the universal inner teachings if Islam (and other religions), rather than being lost in ostentatious and spiritless flailing in imitation of its external manifestations and the resultant stoic bigotry, like a large number of their co-religionists. Most refreshing is their advice for the Muslims of Israel:

Q: We’ve recently received reports that individual civilians have surrounded several buildings, and have defiantly taken up positions on several rooftops, in Gaza to prevent Israeli air strikes – (“protests force Israel to halt airstrikes”)…

A: …what we, of course, view as State sponsored terrorism.

Q: What is the Rose Crescent’s position on Palestinians acting as human shields to protect homes?

A: First, let me say that our hearts go out to our Muslim brothers and sisters in the Gaza Strip. As you know, we do have a number of Rose Crescent members in Palestine who are working amongst the people to promote non-violence resistance.

We hope that this coming together as human shields will be the first act towards an awakening of consciousness in the Palestinian people towards the power of what Gandhi called Satyagraha.

Q: Do you think the strategy of humans shielding homes will work?

A: Work to dissuade the Israelis, you mean? Only if this kernel follows Gandhi’s path and the Palestinian people take the moral high road. But to do so they’ll have to give up decades of the ingrained “Kalashnikov mentality.”

Q: That won’t be easy.

A: No, it won’t.

Q: Some of them have even taken their AKs up onto the rooftop with them.

A: What the Palestinian people need to realize, and both the entire Arab world and the Israelis for that matter, is that they won’t be safe until the Israelis feel safe.

Muslims need to realize that we are dealing with a people who have been so deeply scarred by the Holocaust that they react to Arabs as if they are fighting Nazis. For many of them, they are still in the Warsaw Ghetto. To fight the Palestinians is to do battle with the Gestapo.

We need to transform the Israeli psychology. But if all the Palestinians do is shield militants, who then carry out more bombings, than the entire human shield will be as pathetic as the Second Infitadah has become.

Q: So what do you propose?

A: What we propose is that peace in the Middle East must begin by healing the trauma of the “Shoa.” As Muslims and Sufis, it is our obligation to assist our Jewish brothers and sisters towards that goal. By pursuing non-violence we can rescue them from reality – which is that they are in grave danger of becoming the very monster they have been flailing against.

[..]

Q: So, by taking the path of Satyagraha, you think the Palestinian people will benefit?

A: Both in this life and in the life to come.

Q: But what if the Israelis don’t respond?

A: How can they not? If they wanted to destroy every Palestinian in Gaza they could easily do it. They have the weapons. They could drop chemical, or even nuclear, weapons and kill every man, woman and child in less than 48 hours. There are only three things preventing that from happening: First, the will of Allah; second, the Jewish people’s beliefs about themselves (their calling as the chosen people); and third, international outcry. The Nazis would have had no problems exterminating the Palestinians.

Q: So what your saying is that, essentially, Palestinian resistance, the lone bomber and the few militants with a rifle, depends on Israeli mercy.

A: The Palestinian armed resistance is both pathetic and useless. The only way to “win” is for everyone to win. The only way to be safe is for everyone to be safe. The Jews can’t do this. They’re too stuck in the past. This really depends on the Palestinian people.

Q: Let’s pray they gain the insight and wisdom.

Granted prancing around playing “human shield” to protect terrorists and military targets is not something I support and is not correctly labelled Satyagraha, which means nonviolent resistance -it does not work unless everyone is nonviolent. Neither is it correct to label attacks on these terrorist and military targets “state sponsored terrorism”. However the idea of following the path of nonviolence means there would be no terrorists to attack and no opportunity for “human shields” to protect them. It means convincing the terrorists in your ranks to lay down their arms (rather than standing in front of them playing martyr – thats not the path of Satyagraha, thats the path of making yourself a legitimate military target). The idea that the Israelis must feel safe before the inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank can be safe is spot on and is the starting point for any road that can ever lead to peace.

Unfortunately, considering the direction the West Bank and especially Gaza are currently heading the path of nonviolence won’t be getting a run there any time soon. Not while the Islamists are on their Hezbollistic high, not while Iran and Syria are sending them money and weapons, not while the Jihad continues to confidently expand in Somalia, the Sudan, Chechnya, Kashmir, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc, etc, not while violent Islamism holds an intoxicating sway over a hundred million and counting. But when the Jihadists get their whooping and their cause loses its momentum and militant Muslims are again tired of war (which may take quite a few years and many defeats), and Islam enters a phase of self-reflection and faces the spiritual vacuum that has engulfed so many of its followers there will be an opportunity for ideas such as the above to get a foot in, to be considered, to perhaps get a sizeable following, even to revitalise Islam as a religion, away from its currently popular manifestation as a delusional political movement. Until then, as far as the Middle East is concerned, they remain in the realm of naive fantasy and wishful thinking, as regretable as that may be.

Michael Young, The Boston Globe, Nov 23rd: “The road to Damascus”

In both Lebanon and Iraq, the Assad regime is fastening on the specter of civil wars it has helped stimulate to insulate itself from threats and project its influence.

Desirable as it is to engage both Syria and Iran in the momentous work of seeking to stabilize Iraq, the Bush administration and its Iraqi partners must not accept any deal that allows Syria to escape judgment at the bar of the UN tribunal or to reimpose its writ on Lebanon.

He also had a shorter piece, this time for a British audience in The Times on the same day: “So how does ‘engaging with Syria’ look now?”

If one has no qualms about abandoning a rare democratic success in the Middle East, as Lebanon has been, then by all means talk to the gentlemen in Damascus. But first someone should remind Mr Blair of a name oddly absent from his recent rhetoric of engagement: Rafiq Hariri. To which we can now add another: Pierre Gemayel.

See also an interview with Michael Young on the Council on Foreign Relations site, Nov 27:

Q: You think if the United States dealt with Syria on Iraq, it would cost Lebanon.

A: Yes, it would certainly cost Lebanon and I think Lebanon’s very fragile independence would be lost. And let me throw out something else: The rationale behind engaging Syria is if you engage Syria you will break Syria off from Iran. This is an absurd rationale, and certainly if I were a Syrian I would laugh at this. Because it’s precisely Syria’s moving closer to Iran in recent months and last year that has made so many foreign powers say, “All right, well let’s now engage Syria.” Syria’s become much more relevant since it strengthened its relationship with Iran.

Nada Doumit in The Daily Star, Nov 28th: “A Lebanese civil war? Not just yet”

… not all the ingredients of civil war are present just yet. While dynamics of confrontation aredeveloping in a polarized Lebanese society, the country is still deeply affected by the wounds of the not-so-distant 1975-90 Civil War. The society is showing impressive antagonism to internal violence. It is true, however, that the systematic assassination of prominent political figures is eroding this resistance.

Most Lebanese politicians, be they Christians or Muslims, Sunnis or Shiites, do not see any meaningful benefits in a full-fledged internal conflict. Many of them fought each other during the Civil War, but today they all agree that resorting to violence would be catastrophic.

David Ignatius, Nov 25th: “Politics as assassination”

Now the United Nations must find a way to make the rule of law real. It has chartered a special investigator, Serge Brammertz, to gather the facts and has called for an international tribunal to try the cases. It must make this rule of law stick.
But the killers always seem to win in Lebanon. That’s the cynics’ rejoinder, and looking at the record of the past quarter-century, it’s hard to argue otherwise. The healthy parts of Arab life keep being overwhelmed by the sickness.
The idea that America is going to save the Arab world from itself is seductive, but it’s wrong. We have watched in Iraq an excruciating demonstration of our inability to stop the killers. The hard work of building a new Middle East will be done by the Arabs, or it won’t happen. What would be unforgivable would be to assume that, in this part of the world, the rule of law is inherently impossible.

Dr. Walid Phares, FrontPageMagazine.com, Nov 24: “Crushing a Flower of the Cedar Revolution”

Gemayel is dead, but, as his younger brother Sami told his friends, “The march continues.” On these shores, the question arises: What should be done?

The answer is clear. The United States and the new Congress must be implacable in resisting the onslaught of terror and fascism in the Middle East. When cynical politicians, interest groups and apologist academics call for the appeasement of Iran and Syria, resist them. When a population is endangered and its leadership is being eliminated, assist them. Will the new Washington rise to the occasion?

Jim Hoagland in the Houston Chronicle, Nov 27: “U.S. must answer Syria’s well-timed act of mayhem”

It is fashionable at the moment to decry black-and-white, evil-vs.-good visions of foreign policy and to maintain that only the expedient grays of “realism” can preserve world order. The debacle in Iraq has given the international promotion of democracy a bad name in some quarters.

But any “realistic” deal that undermines Lebanon’s hard-won freedom from Syrian control, and protects murderers in Damascus, would quickly become a fool’s bargain. This is a clear case, as the U.N. involvement to strengthen Lebanon’s sovereignty over all its frontiers demonstrates, where doing the moral thing is also the realistic thing.

Editorial in the Washington Post, Nov 27th: “Lebanon and Jim Baker”

The Islamic fascists can feel good about their prospects. Nascent democracies in Iraq and Lebanon are in turmoil, and the developing Hamas terror state in Gaza has plunged the Palestinian Authority into war with Israel and all but rendered Palestinian democracy-building moribund for now. Iran’s nuclear weapons program goes forward unabated. If Tehran and Damascus are rewarded with a diplomatic windfall in Iraq, it will be another signal that the democracies are in retreat, with the thugs pressing their offensive.

UPDATE (29/11): Christopher Hitchens on Slate.com, Nov 27: “From Beirut to Baghdad: he ghastly predictability of nihilist violence.”

The objectionable thing about the proposed Baker-Hamilton “talks” is not that they are talks but that they give the impression of looking for someone to whom to surrender. And they have, apparently, no preconditions. It would be an excellent thing to have direct negotiations with Iran, for instance, with all matters on the table. But if the mullahs did not have to sacrifice their ongoing nuclear deception in order to get to that table, then all the efforts of the Europeans, the United Nations, and the International Atomic Energy Agency to get them to do so would have been shown to be risible. With Syria, there is an even more intelligible precondition to be announced. Most people are unaware of this fact, but Damascus has always refused to recognize Lebanon as an independent state. There is no Syrian Embassy in Beirut. Implicitly and explicitly, this suggests that the country is regarded as an actual or potential part of a “Greater Syria.” Is it really too much to demand that Syria acknowledge the self-determination, or “right to exist,” of a fellow member of the Arab League? Without this line of demarcation, for one thing, the “withdrawal” of Syrian soldiers and police is a merely tactical thing; a retreat over the horizon while the Assad dynasty waits for better days. These “better” days may well not be long in coming.

Those who blame the violence in Baghdad on the American presence must have a hard job persuading themselves that the mayhem in Beirut and Afghanistan—and the mayhem that is being planned and is still to come—is attributable to the same cause. But the instigators are the same in all cases: the parties of god and their foreign masters. If we cannot even stand up for Lebanon in this crisis, even rhetorically, then we are close to admitting that these parties have won.

(h/t Judith Apter Klinghoffer)

(h/t The Thinking Leb)

See also the following bloggers for insider knowledge and up to date commentary on events in Lebanon:

Across the Bay
Michael Totten’s Middle East Journal
From Beirut to the Beltway
Lebanese Bloggers
The Thinking Leb
Lebanese Political Journal
Beirut Spring

Some extracts from Eric Reeves’ latest analysis of the situation in Darfur:

Failing to establish any urgent time-frame or meaningful benchmarks for a Darfur security force, the international community simply watches as genocidal violence spreads uncontrollably, threatening the entire region

By Eric Reeves

November 26, 2006 — Darfur and eastern Chad are now in the throes of uncontrolled, cataclysmic violence. Anarchic conditions are expanding with terrifying speed, even as the international community gives no evidence that it is prepared to act in any meaningful fashion to stabilize the crisis or to halt rapidly accelerating, ethnically-targeted human destruction. Humanitarian relief efforts are daily more deeply imperiled by intolerable levels of insecurity; and as UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland has very recently reported to the Security Council, Khartoum’s grim war of attrition against humanitarian operations in Darfur is relentlessly more successful. Moreover, the possible collapse of the Chadian government of Idriss Deby before growing military pressure from Chadian rebel groups, supported by Khartoum, could have potentially catastrophic implications for humanitarian operations in eastern Chad.

The events of recent weeks—in Addis Ababa, Tripoli, Khartoum, Beijing, New York, London, Paris, Berlin, and Washington—make all too clear that diplomatic paralysis has set in, and that the genocidal quo will prevail for months.

[..]

In assessing Darfur’s realities, we do have at least one source of relentless, searing honesty—that of retiring UN aid chief Jan Egeland, who this week made his last report on Darfur to the UN Security Council (September 22, 2006). The report, and its accompanying document (“Fact Sheet on Access Restrictions in Darfur and Other Areas of Sudan”), make clear how far genocidal destruction is from ending, and how little the international community is doing to halt the violence or provide security for the humanitarian organizations that struggle heroically, amidst intolerable levels of insecurity and harassment by Khartoum.

Egeland begins his report with the most fundamental truth about Darfur:

“I just concluded my 4th and final mission as Emergency Relief Coordinator to Darfur. I return with a plea from beleaguered Darfurians for immediate action to finally stop the atrocities against them. For more than a thousand days and a thousand nights, the defenseless civilians of Darfur have been living in fear for their lives, and the lives of their children. The Government’s failure to protect its own citizens, even in areas where there are no rebels, has been shameful, and continues. So does our own failure, more than a year after world leaders in this very building pledged their own responsibility to protect civilians where the government manifestly fails to do so.”

Egeland also adumbrated a shameful chronology of Khartoum-sponsored civilian destruction:

“When I went to Darfur on my first visit in late June 2004, accompanying the Secretary-General, we saw a civilian population under attack, prompting the displacement of one million people. When I returned to Darfur last week, four million people, two-thirds of Darfur’s population, were in need of emergency assistance. The number of internally displaced has risen to an unprecedented two million. The attacks on villages and the displacement of tens of thousands of civilians continue, reaching the horrific levels of early 2004.”

To this figure of 4 million must be added some 400,000 conflict-affected civilians in eastern Chad: Darfuri refugees (220,000); Chadian internally displaced persons (90,000 according to the latest figures from the UN High Commission for Refugees); and approaching 100,000 Chadian civilians affected in other ways by the conflict that continues its massive spill-over into eastern Chad.

And there is also the ghastly death toll to date: some 500,000 people have already died from violence, disease, malnutrition, and despair since the outbreak of major conflict in February 2003 (the most recent mortality assessment by this writer, surveying all extant global morality data, is April/May 2006 at http://www.sudanreeves.org/Article102.html; no additional global mortality data have been published since the UN World Health Organization study of mortality rates in spring 2005).

Egeland rightly focuses specific attention on the atrocities recently committed in the village of Sirba (West Darfur), a now notorious and unusually well-investigated attack by Khartoum and its Janjaweed militia allies on innocent civilians:

“Villages, camps and communities outside the urban centers of Darfur are again being burnt and looted. Women and children are abused, raped and killed with impunity. Just ten days ago the village of Sirba saw three attacks by government forces and Arab militia that resulted in innocent civilians, mainly women and children, killed and injured. I met some of the victims in the hospital of El Geneina. A mother told me how she held her two-year-old daughter in her arms as the child was willfully shot in the neck by an armed man, despite her repeated begging to spare her daughter. The wounded child did, as I could see, miraculously survive and now recovers in the good care of the Sudanese local doctors. Neither the Government [of Sudan] nor the African Union was able or willing to show presence or deploy proactively in Sirba before the massacre, despite repeated warnings by villagers and aid workers of the impending attacks.”

The refusal of the African Union to deploy to Sirba, despite the clearly impending, ethnically-motivated attack on its residents, highlights the issue of what mandate will guide any force that is to change the security dynamic in Darfur.

[..]

Egeland continued his unsparing narrative to the Security Council (November 22, 2006):

“Just as I left Sudan this Saturday [November 18, 2006], two massive military operations started in the Jebel Marra and Birmaza area in North Darfur. A dozen villages were attacked and looted, driving more than 8,000 more innocent men, women and children from their homes, and leaving many killed and injured. In the Birmaza area, huge amounts of livestock were stolen and houses burnt, deliberately depriving the population of their means of survival. In the Jebel Marra, up in the mountains, where the nights are freezing at this time of year, the attackers systematically looted food, clothing, and blankets. This means that babies and small children who survived the attacks might now freeze to death. Let us be clear: these acts are crimes of the most despicable kind. They are an affront to humanity.”

The refusal of the international community to be moved sufficiently by this “affront” is the obverse moral failure.

The violence has now spread to Chad (from the same report):

Khartoum-supported rebel groups captured the key eastern Chadian town of Abeche on November 25, 2006. This prompted the French to close down its air base outside Abeche, including to humanitarian flights. There is extreme concern within the humanitarian community about the ability to provide relief for hundreds of thousands of people in this remote and bereft region. The situation on the ground is far from clear, but wire dispatches today (November 26, 2006) suggest that Chadian government troops have re-captured Abeche. On the other hand, Reuters reports that,

“A Chadian rebel column rumbled westwards towards the capital N’Djamena on Sunday [November 26, 2006] just hours after the army retook the eastern town of Abeche, a French diplomat said. The diplomat confirmed the French embassy in N’Djamena had issued a message informing its citizens that a rebel convoy was moving towards the city through Batha province—which would put the convoy at least 250 km (150 miles) from N’Djamena. ‘It’s difficult to tell how many (vehicles)…it could be anything from 10 to 60 to 80,’ the diplomat said.” (Reuters [dateline: N’Djamena], November 26, 2006)

Voice of America (dateline: Geneva) reports on the most immediate concern:

“UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres is warning that humanitarian aid for hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees from Darfur and displaced Chadians could be jeopardized by a fresh outbreak of fighting in remote eastern Chad. [ ] The UN refugee agency has its local headquarters in Abeche. Its staff of 300 cares for more than 200,000 refugees from Darfur, sheltered in 12 camps. It also assists many of the 90,000 Chadians who were displaced by unrest over the past year.”

[..]

The character of the violence in eastern Chad was captured in a recent (November 15, 2006) report from Human Rights Watch (“Chad/Sudan: End Militia Attacks on Civilians: UN-AU Summit Must Strengthen International Force in Darfur and Chad”):

“Since late October [2006], Human Rights Watch has documented several incidents of indiscriminate aerial bombing of civilians in northwestern Darfur and Chad by Sudanese government forces.”

Such cross-border military attacks by Khartoum’s Antonov aircraft are consistent with the cross-border attacks on civilians involving the regime’s bombers and helicopter gunships, documented by Human Rights Watch in February 2006 (and based on a “Human Rights Watch research mission to eastern Chad in January-February 2006”):

“The government of Sudan is actively exporting the Darfur crisis to its neighbor by providing material support to Janjaweed militias [ ], by backing Chadian rebel groups that it allows to operate from bases in Darfur, and by deploying its own armed forces across the border into Chad. [ ] Attacks on Chadian civilians accelerated dramatically in the wake of a December 2005 assault on Adré, in eastern Chad, by Chadian rebels with bases in Darfur and supported by the government of Sudan.” [ ]

“On some occasions, the Janjaweed attacks [in Chad] appear to be coordinated with those of the Chadian rebels. On other occasions, Janjaweed militias have carried out attacks inside Chad accompanied by Sudanese army troops with helicopter gunship support.” (Human Rights Watch, “Darfur Bleeds: Recent Cross-Border Violence in Chad,” February 2006, page 2).

[..]
A sense of the scale of recent destruction is also offered in the recent Human Rights Watch report:

“Chadian militia groups have attacked dozens of villages in southeastern Chad over the last 10 days, killing several hundred civilians, injuring scores of people and driving at least 10,000 people from their homes. In a wave of violence that is sweeping through rural areas, villagers are defending themselves with spears and poisoned arrows against militia groups of Arab nomads armed with automatic weapons. A clear pattern has emerged in which Chadian Arab militia groups are targeting non-Arab villages in southeastern Chad.”

“Militia groups attacked as many as 60 Chadian villages separated by several hundred kilometers of rugged terrain on November 4-5 [2006] and in the week that followed. The militias then loot the villages that have been cleared of civilians. In some instances, villages are attacked or destroyed but not looted, suggesting the motive is not robbery, and the level of brutality is rising. Human Rights Watch documented several attacks where militia members mutilated men in their custody and deliberately burned women to death.”

[..] And the ethnic violence that has defined conflict in Darfur has the potential to move even further west in Chad. Lydia Polgreen of the New York Times reported from Djedidah, Chad (October 31, 2006):

“Arab men on horseback rode into her village, shouting racial epithets over the rat-tat-tat of Kalashnikov gunfire. ‘They shouted “zurga,”’ [Halima Sherif] said, an Arabic word for black [*and also a derogatory racial epithet---ER*]. ‘They told us they would take our land. They shot many people and burned our houses. We all ran away.’ Scenes like this one have been unfolding in the war-ravaged Darfur region of western Sudan for more than three years, and since the beginning of this year Sudanese Arabs have also been attacking Chadian villages just across Sudan’s porous border.”

[..] “The violence in Darfur has been spilling over into Chad since at least early this year [but] the violence around one of the other interior villages that was attacked, Kou Kou, is different and ominous, aid workers and analysts say. It appears to have been done by Chadian Arabs against non-Arab villages in Chad, and was apparently inspired by similar campaigns of violence by Sudanese Arab militias in Sudan.”

[..]“If the racial and ethnic conflict that has infected Darfur is being copied by Chad’s Arabs, then the violence spreading beyond Darfur’s borders could presage even further regional conflict, said David Buchbinder, a researcher for Human Rights Watch who specializes in Chad. ‘The racial ideology is spreading, and that is very dangerous,’ Buchbinder said.”

(via The Passion of the Present)

And this from an AFP report:

Deby’s government spokesman, Hourmadji Moussa Doumgor, accused Saudi Arabia as well as neighbouring Sudan, which denies accusations of backing rebels in Chad, of mounting “a large scale operation to destabilise it”.

“This operation bears the hand of Sudan and Saudi Arabia,” said Doumgor, who is also communications minister. “It’s Sudan and Saudi Arabia that are equipping and training mercenaries, and providing them with the necessary logistics to attack Chad today on several fronts in the east.”

Doumgor said “the international community must be aware” that Chad faced “the kind of war for the promotion of militant Islam preached by Al-Qaeda of Bin Laden, which won’t spare any country in the region.”

He alleged that “60 percent” of Nouri’s men are “young Wahabites between 13 and 17 years old … recruited in the madrassas (Koranic schools) of Jeddah, Mecca and Riyadh”.

General Mahamat Nouri leads the Union of Forces for Democracy and Development (UFDD) rebel group, which had taken control of Abeche.

Any statements coming from Deby’s government of the world’s most corrupt state are to be looked at with the highest degree of skepticism, as he is a desperate crackpot who recently fabricated reports that the United States was helping him negotiate changes to conditions imposed on Chad by the World Bank on how it can spend oil revenue (most of it must be spent on education, health, poverty reduction and a future-generations fund – notably missing are weapons, which Deby went and bought anyway). And the above sounds like a ploy to rally some international counterjihadist allies to his side. Unquestionably Sudan is supporting rebel groups in Chad – much like Chad is supporting rebel groups in Darfur. Obviously more questionable is the direct involvement of Saudi Arabia and the claim that 60% of Nouri’s men are Wahhabis recruited there. And at least some of the rebel groups are certainly not Islamist – Deby has made many enemies and there are calls for his removal from many Chadian factions, including some in his government and military. On the other hand the Chadian Arab militias described above are clearly Arab Supremacist Jihadists, much like the ones carrying out genocide in Darfur.

The Khartoum-fed cancer has spread to another country.

“Problem principle” blowback:

[..] Alexander Litvinenko, a fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, died Thursday of heart failure after falling gravely ill from what doctors said was poisoning by a rare radioactive substance.

Tests by forensic toxicologists found radioactive polonium-210 in Litvinenko’s urine, Britain’s Health Protection Agency announced Friday. Agency officials said discovery of the element in a poisoning case was “an unprecedented event.”

[..] Litvinenko spoke to academics James Heartfield and Julia Svetlichnaja from the University of Westminster in three interviews that lasted a total of about six hours in April and May. The Daily Telegraph published a syndicated version of the interviews Saturday.

Litvinenko was recruited into the Soviet-era KGB and also worked for its successor, the Federal Security Service, or FSB. He was later promoted to a specialist counterterrorism and organized crime unit. After the fall of communism, he said his directive was to recruit powerful businessmen who could stimulate an economic boom, and to hire assassins.

“So if somebody was the victim of a crime — like his daughter was raped — you would offer to let them take revenge on the perpetrator,” Litvinenko was quoted as saying. “This was how we recruited killers.”

[..] In the interviews, Litvinenko said that as a favor to a senior former colleague who was in debt to moneylenders from the Caucasus, he was told to arrest the creditors and execute them.

“Our department worked on the so-called problem principle — the government had a problem and we had simply to deal with it,” he said.

He said he was ordered to kill Mikhail Trepashkin, another security officer who had spoken about the FSB’s activities. He said he was also told to kidnap a prominent Chechen businessman based in Moscow to trade for Russian intelligence officers taken hostage by Chechens.

By 1997, Litvinenko said his department had become “responsible for illegal punishments or so-called extralegal executions of unsuitable businessmen, politicians and other public figures. In parallel, the department blackmailed the same targets for funds.”

[..] Government opponents were “illegally killed — not court executed” in Russian streets or forests by the agency, Litvinenko said, speaking in English.

In 1998, Litvinenko publicly accused his superiors of ordering him to kill Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who was living in exile in London. He spent nine months in jail on charges of abuse of office, then was acquitted and moved to Britain, which granted him asylum in 2000.

[..] In Moscow, the government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta made a series of allegations Saturday about the killing, pointing suspicion at London’s Russian exile community. It portrayed Litvinenko as a violent and unintelligent pawn who “made his choice and drank his poison … when he betrayed those he worked for.”

The newspaper speculated Berezovsky was involved, aiming either to use the death to discredit Putin’s government or settle a business dispute. A presenter on Russia’s state-run Channel One television channel said there was “a theory Litvinenko poisoned himself.”

He went to the trouble of acquiring Polonium just to poison himself in a cafe and die of radiation poisoning? Why didn’t he just overdose on nutmeg or tie himself up and feed himself to ravenous goldfish?

Meanwhile, ZZ Top inspired Jihad Monkeys at KavkazCenter.com (thank you Google News!) quote Anti-Zionist conspiracy wackos from the loonasphere… who quote flakey Zionist “intelligence” site: “Dead Russian Spy was israeli Double Agent”:

Sure as heck puts israeli relations with Russia in a whole new different light.

Enlighten me, oh Illumined ones, what “whole new different light” would that be? Other than the one shining out of your anus?

Meanwhile The Sunshine Band at KC have been doing a little sleuthing of their own and found the smoking/radiating gun in.. China!

My post “The Caucasian Tinderbox” was voted equal third place (out of 14 entries) in the non-council section of the weekly Watcher’s Council “most link-worthy pieces of writing around” round up.

See the vote tally and all the entries here.

Still on Progressive Islam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has long held that if Islamic culture is to change, if it is to evolve, if it is to undergo a Reformation, the key is the women of Islam. The key is their liberation.

Here are some positive signs that this process is indeed slowly but surely getting under way.

US:

NEW YORK: Muslim feminists from around the world have vowed to create the first women’s council to interpret the Koran and overcome two stereotypes about their religion: that Muslims are terrorists and Islam oppresses women.

The women’s council was among the most groundbreaking ideas introduced at a weekend meeting of more than 100 leaders in the fledgling Islamic feminist movement.

Many in the newly formed group, the Women’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality, said strict sharia law was not divine because it was created by men and should be changed to incorporate women’s rights.
[..]
Daisy Khan, director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement, said she hoped to create a fund to provide scholarships for Muslim women to study Islamic law so they could form a Shura Council of Women, the first with women interpreting the Koran.

Overcoming the “stereotype that Islam oppresses women” sounds a little contradictory if they feel the need to incorporate women’s rights into Sharia (indicating these rights are absent) and reinterpret the Koran, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on that one. Its only the start of a rather long road after all. But to quote Michael Totten, on the fact that burkas and veils are tools used by men to oppress women: “Spare me the excuses. I have heard them all and I’m not buying.”

Malaysia (from the same article):
Zainab Anwar, “executive director of Sisters in Islam, a Malaysian group working on women’s rights within the Islamic framework”, speaking at the above meeting:

“In our societies men hold power and they decide what Islam should mean and how we can obey that particular understanding of Islam,” [..]
“I can’t live with a God that is unjust,” she said. “The law is progressive, but those men controlling the law aren’t.”

Now we’re talking.

Canada:
(h/t RightGirl at the Western Standard blog)

Speaking at a conference in Gatineau, Que., Saturday, journalist-filmmaker Nelofer Pazira (Kandahar and Return to Kandahar) told the audience it is time for the Muslim community to start looking in the mirror.

Instead of complaining that the media only show fanatics and extremists, “we must look at ourselves and see how much we have contributed to that,” she said. Reticence and fear of being labelled have silenced too many moderate Muslims, Pazira added.

She was speaking at the 24th annual conference of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, which drew close to 200 women, and a handful of men, from across Canada.

Pazira spoke after morning prayers, the singing of the national anthem (full versions in both English and French) and a keynote address by noted Mideast expert Mai Yamani.

“I’m tired of all our complaints about the media,” she said, smiling. (Pazira works for CBC’s The National.) “We do not make it easy for the media to cover us.”
[..]
For Yamani an anthropologist who was the first Saudi Arabian woman to obtain a doctorate at the University of Oxford, and now a research fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London the challenge is broad.

Muslim women at the crossroads, she said, must choose between an open Islam that embraces the modern and a closed version that rejects the realities of our time. But the choices made will affect everybody.

“We are all at the crossroads Muslims, Christians, Jews and we have no option but to face the future together. We all share a humanity.”

The fundamentalist approach to Islam, both abroad and at home, came in for much criticism at the conference. The council, which does not claim to speak for all Muslim women, says its membership is mostly educated and professional women.

One woman raised in the West expressed her frustration at how the situation has developed here, where people should know better. Shahla Khan said conservative Islam has come into the West and is dominating the scene. She said she gets angry every time she goes to a mosque and has to enter through the back door, while her sons and husband go in through the front.

Her comments drew loud applause.

Yamani, whose books are banned in Saudi Arabia, said it is time for moderate and liberal Muslims to start speaking out more. “All the intellectuals and the more liberal Muslims have been marginalized and silenced.”

Germany:
(h/t The Jawa Report)

A female speaker gives a brilliant speech on the treatment of women in Islam, on honour killings, and on the need for Muslims to stand up against the Islamists. “We have to confront Political Islam full force”. I don’t know what conference she is speaking at, but it was held March 8th (International Women’s Day), this year:

(UPDATE) Iran:
Nobel peace prize winner and law lecturer at the University of Tehran, Shireen Ebadi, in a Q&A for the Times of India:

Q: You’re a Muslim arguing for dynamic interpretation of Islamic laws to make women equal before law. What’s your message to those who believe Islam condemns women to an inferior status?

A: I say, look carefully in the Koran so that the oppressors cannot mislead you with selective quotes. Don’t let people masquerading as clerics claim monopoly on understanding Islam. Allah created us as equal, and when we struggle for equality, we’re doing what Allah wanted us to do.

Q: Is it possible to follow every tenet of Islam in today’s world?

A: Many Islamic laws, like stoning to death, are not even there in Koran. But some laws need to be discussed. For example, Koran says during Ramadan a Muslim must fast from sunrise to sunset. It’s easy to do so in Iran or Saudi Arabia where the days and nights are almost equal. But if a Muslim goes to the North Pole, can he fast for six months, which is the duration of the day? So a third way is needed — and offered by Islam. The secondary laws say, implement the law in its spirit. In this case, divide the day(24 hours) into three equal parts, and use one part for fasting. By another law a rape victim has to produce four witnesses. This was to ensure no one will bring false testimonials. Today, the medical profession is such that it needs a single drop of blood to establish paternity. Surely it can serve in place of four witnesses!

See also my previous post “Democratic Muslims of Denmark; Copenhagen – the Mecca of the liberal Islamic reformation?”, which includes videos of Irshad Manji and Wafa Sultan speaking at a conference in Denmark organised by the Democratic Muslims organisation.

Note that I’ve been using the term “Progressive” rather than “Moderate”, as is common in Western media. Here’s part of the reason why. Foreign Policy has published a study which looks at the different between Moderate and Radical Muslims, in an attempt at answering the question “What Makes a Muslim Radical?”. The study found that there is in fact very little difference. And when a difference exists, it is not in the way you may expect.

The study is based on a Gallup World Poll that included more than 9,000 interviews in nine predominantly Muslim countries.

Their findings:

• “There is no significant difference in religiosity between moderates and radicals” and “radicals are no more likely to attend religious services regularly than are moderates.”
• “The radicals were found to earn more and stay at school longer than the moderates.” Yep, you read that right. Poverty has little to do with radicalisation. In fact I’d say it is more likely the same forces, that drive large segments of the Western middle class towards idealist “mass movements”, like Socialism, drives the more well-off Muslims towards the mass movement of radical Islamism. Others are of course simply brainwashed. More on this below.
• “More radicals expressed satisfaction with their financial situation and quality of life than their moderate counterparts, and a majority of them expected to be better off in the years to come.” Fits in well with my last comment.
• “Both moderates and radicals in the Muslim world admire the West, in particular its technology, democratic system, and freedom of speech.” Perhaps it is themselves they hate?
• “Although almost all Muslims believe the West should show more respect for Islam, radicals are more likely to feel that the West threatens and attempts to control their way of life. Moderates, on the other hand, are more eager to build ties with the West through economic development.” Again, seems like leftard paranoia to me. The West controls their way of life. In Australia leftards complain about the Liberal Party imposing “a fascist state” on them etc, while other people are happy for the economic opportunities presented to them. The G20 protests being a perfect example.

One of the things the above goes to confirm is that there is no great silent body of Moderate Muslims in the meaning that most Westerners attach to the term, although there is a small but growing number of Progressive Muslims or Democratic Muslims or Reformation Muslims or, as Wafa Sultan who believes Islam can only be transformed, not reformed, may prefer, Transformation Muslims. What there also is is a mass movement of Islamism, a utopian ideology like many before it, which has found extremely fertile ground in Islamic cultures. And that ground is extremely fertile for a mixture of cultural, religious and historical reasons, like the religious tradition of Jihad, a cultural obsession with honour and a visceral ly ingrained sense of victimhood. Unsurprisingly the leaders of the movement are from amongst the well off and educated, from sections of society that have been susceptible to the siren song of utopian ideology since concepts of power and possession first appeared amongst human beings.

I also recommend this article by historian Charles Allen, who traces the ebbs and flows and the current surge of the utopian political ideology embedded in Wahhabi and Deobandi (the sect the Taliban belong to) Islam. Extract:
(h./t Judith Apter Klinghoffer)

There is a widely held view in the West that the violence perpetrated by Muslim jihadists is a response to Western imperialism: a defence of Islam that will cease as soon as the US and its allies pull out of the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan (taking the Israelis with them). As a student of South Asian history I am bound to take a more sanguine view: that this violence has its roots in the perceived failure of Islam to achieve its destiny as a global religion, resulting in attempts to renew Sunni Islam and set it back on course to become the new world political order. The failure of our respective state departments to recognise the true nature of this revivalism has, I believe, contributed significantly to the West’s failure to get to grips with the phenomenon of Islamist extremism.

Finally, for a look even further into the history of Islam and what wrong, have a read of “Islamic world needs to look back to fine tune and set its future bearings”, by Iranian journalist Iqbal Latif.

Aussie Muslim blogger The Usual Suspect has this quiz for the intellectual Islamists in the audience (which seems to originate from the progressive Muslim blog, Muslim Wake up!). I also enjoyed reading some of her other recent posts on Meat Sheikh Al-Hilaly and what she believes is wrong with the Muslim community, check them out on her blog, Three Lives.

In anticipation of the reestablishment of the Caliphate what better way to
prepare for that coming paradise than with a quick quiz to help one get
acclimated to the new rules?

1. When the Caliphate is established, it will be run by which nationality?
a. Nigerians
b. Pakistanis
c. Saudis
d. Egyptians

2. Under the Caliphate, slave markets will return to what city?
a. Mecca
b. Dar es-Salam
c. Cairo
d. All of the above

3. Under the Caliphate, a woman is free to marry which of the following?
a. any man she chooses
b. any man her father chooses
c. any man her brother chooses
d. any man who offers the most money to the family

4. A woman becoming Caliph will happen when which of the following occurs?
a. hell freezes over
b. the 12th imam returns
c. the 1200th imam returns
d. one week after never

5. During the Caliphate Inauguration, Nancy Ajram will be stoned in what
city?
a. Beirut
b. Tripoli, Libya
c. Tripoli, Lebanon
d. Too close to call

6. During Caliphate Inauguration, Amr Khaled will be where?
a. Los Angeles
b. Las Vegas
c. Jet skiing in Sharm el-Sheik
d. Disneyworld

7. Under the Caliphate, South Asians in the Persian Gulf will be treated
how?
a. like human beings
b. like Africans
c. somewhere between Africans and Jehovah’s Witnesses
d. the same.

8. With respect to Darfur, the Caliphate will do which of the following?
a. not a damn thing
b. not a Goddamned thing
c. a & b
d. b & a

9. Please complete the following: It will take Turkey ____ year(s) to seize
control of the Caliphate.
a. 5
b. 10
c. 0, they already control it
d. However long it takes but there is no way Pakistanis will be allowed to
call the shots. Maybe a Sudanese, but that’s it.

10. Life in a Sharia paradise is
a. totally awesome
b. awesome for women since they can be fully protected
c. like Mardi Gras without the booze, boobs, and music
d. pretty chill but only if you get to wear the black turban, otherwise it
ranks below a root canal in Kinshasa.

The answer key:
1. d
2. d
3. b, c, or d
4. c or d
5. c
6. c
7. c
8. d
9. d
10. a

The breakdown:
If you got 100% correct congrats you are officially Caliphate ready.
80-90% correct you have achieved zealous convert status.
60-70% correct you are licensed to work Jeddah, Dubai and Khartoum
30-50% correct you are kafir scum. Get away from here.
0-20% correct you had better pray brother.

Gees, such cynical partypooperism. Can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, you know. And the Caliphate is going to be like the biggest omelette ever! Its like the eternal breakfast in bed at The Ever-lasting Dawning of the Glorious New Age of Even-Better-Than-Communism-ism. Would suck to get the kitchen gig though.

The leader of Hezbollah Hassan “Nose of Allah” Nasrallah is calling on his supporters (and supporters of the Assad dictatorship next door) to start mass protests in Beirut this Thursday, that could last for days or weeks “until we impose, via our peaceful, civilised and democratic means, the downfall of the illegitimate, unconstitutional government – the government of (US ambassador Jeffrey) Feltman, not the government of prime minister Fouad Siniora.”

Which is the kind of dribbling taqiyya we’ve come to expect from the sly little Islamo-Fascist.

Thursday is the chosen day because that day the Cabinet of Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora is set to meet.

Mustapha at Beirut Springs believes Hassan The Nose iain’t quite getting the whiff of the Sunni sentiment in Lebanon, and recalls explaining to a Shiite friend (Mustapha is a Sunni) who is “not religious but a fervent supporter of Hezbollah” why most Lebanese Sunnis don’t share her enthusiasm:

After talking with her, I realized that she simply couldn’t understand why would anyone not support Hezbollah. Her feelings were so strong and entrenched that she concluded: “To me, the only reason why you would be against Hezbollah, is either because you hate the Shiaas, or because you are taking orders from the Americans, why else would you gloat at the killing of our brothers and sisters during the Israeli war?”

[..]
My friend was shocked when I told her about what Syria did in the North, where people were seriously harassed under Syrian tutelage. And I’m not talking about regular political assassinations and bogeymanship, I’m talking about mass humiliation and utter disregard for human dignity. Lands stolen and plundered, Men ordered to send their wives to Syrian officers, mothers were given machine guns and forced to kill their own children. Cars were stolen and sold back to their owners, phones were tapped and mass scale harassments were taking place. If you add that to the regime’s history with the Sunnis (Mass wiping of Hama, shelling beb el tibbene, killing muftis, installing the Karamis to rule Tripoli) you would understand why Hariri’s murder and its consequences are not just an excuse for Sunnis to grab power, it’s a loud, resounding ENOUGH from an entire sect. This is no longer about Hariri, it’s about a straw that broke a camel’s back.

As I concluded from my friend and from Nassrallah’s speech yesterday, Hezbollah and its supporters seem to sincerely believe that the only reason the Sunnis want the Hariri tribunal is because Hariri is buying out their loyalties, or because his media empire is mobilizing and misinforming them. Yesterday, the overwhelming Sunni reaction to Nassrallah’s speech was a loud: “does he think we’re stupid?”

No, he thinks there is noone in the country who has the power to stop him.

The Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, a former Soviet spy currently in intensive care in London after being poisoned with thallium, was granted asylum in the United Kingdom in 2001. A few months later he released his book “Blowing up Russia : Terror from Within”:

In this book Litvinenko alleged that the FSB was responsible for the apartment block bombings in Russia that were blamed on Chechens and became the pretext for the second Chechen War. I have not read the book myself, although it has been sitting in my Amazon Wish List for a couple of years now, but the reviews and the cover suggest the book’s thesis is that the FSB used acts of terror, abduction and contract killings to influence public opinion in Russia, using fear and nationalism to steer the country under authoritarian rule. The book has just shot to the top of my reading list.

(h/t Noisy Room)

Mousalreza Servati, an Iranian MP who is a member of the “influential parliamentary cultural committee”, on the proposed segregation of the sexes in Iranian universities:

“When the working environment is all-male or all-female, employees and students are liberated from certain distractions. In free environments, the possibility exists that when a lady passes, a gentleman likes her face or her behaviour and has it not happened quite often that this interest later results in the wife leaving the husband to marry another man?”

I can see how that would be rather frustrating after the parents went to so much trouble to arrange that marriage in the first place.

Couldn’t liberation be achieved by just getting women to wear a sack on their head or something? Oh wait, you’ve already tried that.